Gaming and other nerd things by Sean Menken. Updates Weekly

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John Scalzi’s The Last Colony is many things. It’s what one has come to expect from the OMW series and all that entails*. It is also two stories crammed together, one of them is about establishing a human colony on a new planet and the other is following up on the geopolitics set up in the previous book. While these stories fall under the greater narrative of the book and involve the same characters, the two stories are left truncated. This leaves the weight of the story to fall upon the characters, which are able to do so with mixed results. Let’s not waste any time and jump in.

The viewpoint character for this book is the same as Old Man’s War, John Perry. This is a double-edged sword. While Perry is likeable enough and reads well enough, he’s also boring and largely ignorant of the greater situation. This problem is highlighted by the fact that he is surrounded by characters that are much more interesting. It could have been Jane, as someone who is trying to understand what it means to be human and knows something about the Conclave, or Zoe, the teenager with Obin bodyguards and is considered a living god. While the story is structured in such a way to make Perry important, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s dull.

Speaking of the story, I mentioned how it’s really two stories smashed together. The first one, is about establishing the colony of Roanoke and the politics surrounding the mission. This plot is essentially ended halfway through, after a dramatic climax with fallout never resolved in the story. The story than shifts to one of galactic politics where the Colonial Union is reaffirmed as a terrible government and Scalzi takes practically every measure to make it unambiguous. This isn’t terribly interesting as it makes the characters less relatable. While there is established motivation, it just feels distant. All of this is further compounded by Saviriti repeatedly calling out the CU, albeit with vague language. Not only that, but it leaves the characters feeling disempowered, they’re closer to disaster movie protagonists trying to survive instead of action heroes trying to win.

Both of these problems culminate in the book’s actual finale. Perry is able to emerge victorious through the off-screen help of his daughter in a matter that smacks of deus ex machine in a fight that has a token causality, who was an asshole anyway**. The book then ends on a happy ending as galaxy altering actions have happened with no pay off. It’s a rather dichotomous approach. On one hand, the characters are too engaged with the politics for them to be a backdrop for their own personal struggle. On the other hand, they don’t have the agency to actually do much about it. I would have vastly preferred it if was harder in one direction.

The book is fine and fun like its predecessors, but there are bigger problems than is predecessors on technical, structural level. Next week I”ll be reviewing Ernest Clines’ Ready Player One. Till next time.

*Although a minor character is a lesbian, so at least it’s not as heteronormative.

**One of the things I liked about Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades is how death was a fairy common occurrence for the protagonists. I agree with David Weber who has said, “War which is always heroic, in which only bad guys (who obviously had it coming, anyway) get killed, in which people hit by high-powered weapons either die instantly and painlessly or receive “only a flesh wound,” in which there are no mental or moral or spiritual casualties, is splatter porn. It trivializes and all too often it desensitizes, allows us to walk away from the hard questions and the moral wrestling with conscience, threats, and costs which should always be part of our understanding of what war really is.”